Faith (Rescue Me, A Contemporary Romance) (7 page)

At last she and Mac were alone. Only for a few minutes, Mrs. Byrne, the nurse had said when she’d left.

“Mac, I’m so sorry.” Faith said at once. She knew he wouldn’t want her to feel guilty or responsible, but she needed him to know that she felt those things anyway.

She could feel him squeeze her hand, almost imperceptibly.

“Liam is here with me. He’s okay, honey. He got help for us.”

Again, her hand twitched with his barely noticeable
squeeze. He knew. He could understand her and he was grateful.

“Faith,” she heard his voice creak like it was coming from his own grave.

She looked into his eyes. Her face was only inches away from him.

“Be happy.”

She looked at him, confused.

“I can’t be happy without you Mac.”

He just looked at her and she could see something in his eyes getting dimmer. A spark that she hadn’t even known still burned was flickering.

“Live.”

It was the last word he said to her before the spark in his eyes went out and the machines sent up a warning alarm to alert the medical staff that the unthinkable had happened, her world – her reason for living – had just ended.

She kept breathing. When she thought about the moment later, all she could remember with clarity was that when her world died in front of her, her heart hadn’t stopped beating. She hadn’t died along with him. She had simply sat there and watched life spin around her without comprehension of what simple words meant or what had happened.

She remembered the nurse shaking her and slapping her face to try and bring her back into the present. She hadn’t been able to move, hadn’t even known what the word meant or who they meant when the doctors and nurses had screamed her name into her face. They had hauled her up and out the door so she could stand at the big glass window and watch as they ripped open Mac’s hospital gown and tried to jolt him back to life. She watched without hope because she knew he was gone. Knew it as soon as she’d seen the light leave his eyes. He had died wanting her to live. She didn’t even know what that word meant anymore.

“I’m so sorry Mrs. Byrne,” the doctor said, sta
nding in front of her, his brow glistening with sweat from the efforts he and his team had made to save her husband’s life.

“His injuries were too massive. The hemorrhaging in his brain was too far gone for him to survive. I’m so so sorry.”

She just stood there. She didn’t cry or scream. Couldn’t even speak. What language was this man speaking? She didn’t understand the words he was saying.

“Mrs. Byrne? Do you understand what I’m telling you?” He asked, concerned.

When she didn’t move or answer, he turned toward the nurse’s station, but a cry from one of the nurses’s on duty jerked his attention back toward Faith.

“She’s bleeding!” The nurse sai
d urgently and pointed at the floor where Faith stood.

Blood flowed down her legs and pooled viscously on the floor around her feet. She swayed where she stood in front of him, and he reached out to grasp her shoulders.

“I need a gurney here,” he shouted to his staff.

It was too late, Faith sagged in his arms without a sound.

Hustling behind him, two strapping male nurses ran up with a metal gurney and stooped to help him hoist Faith on the rolling bed.

“Oh my god, what’s wrong with her?”

Behind the doctor, Lisa stood with a gray-faced Liam watching the latest nightmare unfold.

“Does she know about Mac? Is this about Mac?”

Her words made no sense and no one bothered to pay attention as they rushed Lisa down the hall.

“She’s pregnant,” Lisa shouted after them, running behind the team down the hall, Liam forgotten and alone behind her.

“She’s four months pregnant!”

At that statement, one of the nurses ran back to Lisa and started asking her questions in quick succession.

This was his fault too, Liam knew. His father’s murder. His mom’s baby trauma. All of it was his fault. He shouldn’t have been driving earlier. It was him who had gotten confused and ran into that psycho Emily. The accident that started his whole chain of tragedy in motion was caused by him.

He knew what his mother would say. She would tell him not to be silly, that it wasn’t his fault. And his father might say that too, but his eyes would tell him the truth. It was his fault. His son was a failure and nothing like Big Mac. His son couldn’t even tell the difference between the brake pedal and the gas pedal. It was his fault. Somewhere, wherever ghosts lived, probably Heaven because his dad had been so well liked and just an all around stand up guy, but where ever he was one thing was certain – he was blaming him. Well this time Liam didn’t disagree with his dad, Liam was blaming himself too.

Faith laid in the hospital bed and tried to think of something positive. That’s what Mac would have wanted and she knew it would be the best thing for her to do. Liam. Her son was safe and healthy and sitting here with her. That was the most positive and the probably the only positive thing in her life right now.

She kept her eyes closed and laid still, on her back. She didn’t want to give him any reason to start apologizing to her again. It seemed that he hadn’t stopped apologizing since she’d woken up from the anesthesia they’d given her while they’d operated in an attempt to save the baby and stop the bleeding. It hadn’t worked. They’d told her that when she’d opened her eyes. Her and Mac’s other child was gone.

She thought of her small, unborn baby and wondered if it was with Mac in Heaven now. Before this had happened she wasn’t entirely sure if she really believed in Heaven and Hell, and Purgatory and all those other Biblical places and characters, but now that she had lost almost everyone she loved in one night, she found herself wanting to believe that it hadn’t all been for nothing. If Mac had just died and his beautiful spirit had just been gone or soon to be in a deep, dark hole in the ground for all eternity and that was just it. Well, that wasn’t a world she wanted to be a part of.

The only way she could keep drawing breath was if Mac’s spirit was somewhere watching over her and Liam. If she could keep talking to him every day like she always had, she might just be able to get out of bed in the morning. Even though he wouldn’t be talking back, she wanted to be able to at least pretend that he was listening.

And she wanted to pretend that he was holding their baby. The only reason she wasn’t curled into a little ball at the thought of losing her child and her husband in one night, was the thought of Mac holding him. It was a him, she’d learned. Another boy. Mac would be happy about that. He always secretly wanted another son, she knew. Not because Liam had disappointed him!

Although that was the first thought her sensitive son had had, she knew, but because he fancied himself the biggest kid of all in a brood of boys with her as a sort of Wendy Darling figure to their Peter Pan Lost Boys. Mac had always been an overgrown kid with a big imagination, just like his favorite, Peter Pan.

“Mom?” She heard Liam say worriedly.

“I’m okay, honey.” She had to reassure him every so often. He had lost his father and his baby brother—and his innocence—in one night, she reminded herself. A little paranoia is going to come with the territory.

It didn’t matter that she was bone achingly tired and all she wanted to do was lie in this hospital bed for the rest of her life. She still had a son to take care of, and she had to be strong for his sake.

To reassure him still more, she opened her eyes and turned her head to look at him. He was perched on the edge of his seat and staring at her worried.

She held out her hand to him.

“Baby, I’m okay. I promise, I’m not leaving. I’m just tired.”

He tried to hide it, but she could see that her words were a relief.

“I know mom, I just wanted to make sure you’re not in pain or anyt
hing? I can get a nurse for you?”

“Everything’s fine. I just need some rest. Are Lisa or Bill here?”

It would be helpful if he would just go back to the neighbor’s house to rest. She knew he wouldn’t go home. And she didn’t want him to be there either, definitely not alone, and definitely not while those two murderers were still on the loose.

Just the thought of what happened made her stomach ache with pain and her eyes
swell with tears she couldn’t afford to shed in front of her fragile son.

“Yeah they’re here mom. They’re in the cafeteria. Mom? Mom, I’m so sorry.”

“Liam, honey, please don’t apologize to me. This isn’t your fault. None of this is your fault.”

She glanced at him again to see if her words had finally sunk in this time. With one quick look at his face and slumped posture, she could see that they hadn’t. She couldn’t deal with his guilt right now.

“Honey, why don’t you go down to the cafeteria and let Lisa and Bill know that you need to go home with them now.”

He shook his head wildly, “No way mom, I’m not leaving you!”

“Thanks baby, I know you’re just trying to help, but I have to get some sleep.”

“Mom, please…” He looked at her, his eyes brimming with unshed tears. She wondered if he even knew they were lurking there, ready to fall like a waterfall at the slightest provocation.

“Please Liam. Please let me rest now.”

Without a word he got up and left, shutting the door quietly behind him the way he never did at home. Home. What was she going to do about their home?

Faith had never had a very close relationship with her parents. Her dad wasn’t even in the picture. He had abandoned her mom and her when Faith was just a little girl.

She didn’t even remember him very well. Her only recollection of the man was of a skinny, tall man with a long ponytail holding a guitar and getting into a pick-up truck. In her mind’s eye he looked at her, where she stood with her mom on the front porch of their claptrap house in East Nashville, and he said, “I’m coming back for you baby when I make it big.” And with that he threw his guitar into the back and climbed into his truck and drove off. She had no memory of ever seeing him again.

Her mom, Myra, had burned all the pictures of him in a rage and the only thing she would ever say about her dad was that he was a dreamer, a drunk, and a no talent excuse for a husband and father. It wasn’t hard for Faith to see that there was no love lost between Myra and her runaway husband, Frank.

Even though she’d never abandoned her, Myra wasn’t all that much better than Frank in Faith’
s opinion. Distant and cold, Myra had looked on her pretty little daughter as a burden to be born and not a delight or a help. She had never abused her, mentally or physically, but children can sense it when they’re loved and no one would ever accuse Myra of being overly loving, caring, or motherly.

Myra. The truth was that Faith hadn’t thought deeply about her in years. She sent her the obligatory Christmas cards and the wedding and baby announcements when she and Mac had married and when Liam had been born, but nothing deeper than that. She’d received only the most perfunctory cards from her mother in return and never had a phone call in all the years she’d been gone from Nashville. She wasn’t even sure her mother had her phone number, if she really thought about it.

But now Myra might be her and Liam’s only option. Mac had been the breadwinner. The one who paid the bills. Faith’s job at the Tourist Bureau was more of a part time thing to keep them in little luxuries like movies and new shoes. Mac’s job with the canneries on the boats was what paid the mortgage, the car payments, and contributed to the savings and retirement plans they tried to maintain.

She tried to think clearly. The painkillers they’d given her were making her thoughts foggy and rambling. What was their situation? Would she have to bite the bullet and call her mother?

The truth was that the thought of staying in Alaska now that Mac was gone was almost terrifying to her. She couldn’t return to their home, the scene of that horrifying crime, and ever feel comfortable and safe again like she had before. It was impossible. No one could expect it of her, could they?

What if they just left? Sell the house, pay the bills off with what remained of Mac’s life insurance after the funeral, and just leave. She could go home again.

Since she’d left Nashville after high school and moved to Boston with a friend, she’d never returned. Honestly never even thought about going back. Why would she? Her mother and her weren’t close and Mac had been her world from that point forward.

Together they’d moved to Maine, following the fishing trail, and from there they’d come to Alaska, in further pursuit of the fishing jackpot. A jackpot they’d never found, although their life here was
a nicer one than in the lower 48, as the locals called all the states that weren’t Alaska.

But, she couldn’t just pick up that life where they’d left off. When that man and his daughter had pushed their way into their home they had ended any hope of letting them return to anything that bordered on normal.

What was normal anymore anyway, she wondered idly, letting the painkillers have their way with her thoughts and feelings. They needed Mac to be normal. She needed to still be pregnant with Mac’s baby for normal to exist and neither or those things were possible. Therefore, normal wasn’t possible. And if normal was impossible, then maybe other things that used to be impossible were now possible. And that meant going home to Nashville and Myra. Maybe it was time for Liam to meet his grandmother.